Madnesses
by Nvyolabb
Summary: Corvo Attano is gently pestered by a leviathan. The low chaos ending isn't "the happy one" it first seemed. Flashfic.
1. Wrenhaven

The Wrenhaven rose. The barest glistening drops first soared heavenward, veiled by fog. Then streams, as if from confused faucets, speared the still air on their ascent. A bead of sweat halted on its way down the tense jaw of a Lord Protector, and changed course, brushing an eyelash as it split from his skin and disappeared. The river banks emptied. His hand burned.


	2. Oil Lamp

She had drawn the same whale oil lamp for weeks. Always as miniature as her pinky nail. Always surrounded by a thick application of blue oils, chalks, inks. Said she saw it so in a dream. The young Empress didn't speak of dreams often. So infrequently so that the Lord Protector could only remember one other she had mentioned as nonchalantly, as if dreaming of a young man with a voice draped in whalesong and eyes thick with the abyss was just that, a dream. Her last painting was the largest, and the lamp within, the smallest. The Lord Protector stared for days at the canvas. Years later, bedridden with fever, he dreamed of the lowest pit in the deepest ocean. A single dot of light radiated from a pinprick of an oil lamp, light that spilled into his eyes and bellowed in his ears.


	3. Seaward

While his skin shrunk and split and stretched with much help from the sun, the wind and the sword, the mark remained with edges as sharp and deftly branded as they had been decades before. Plagued with withering purpose, the former Lord Protector severed himself from royalty, and then, from the earth. No shore leave was short enough. No isle as arresting as the sea. His hair grew long. His gloves, it was rumored, were sewn into his hands.

One morning, a cool breeze whistled past his left hand, and for the first time in many years, it ached. The younger whalers jostled playfully and praised the good weather. None had finished making their beds before towering, curdling mountains stripped all blue from the sky and the vessel started listing at every turn. Rain thundered on the deck, on Corvo, on the burning hand. Waves that would have kissed the highest window of Dunwall Tower and razed it as easily slid past and lifted the creaking ship as if to show the warring elements what they had found.

Corvo made for the nearest latch that led below deck with the rest of the crew before debris and seawater and wind struck him so bodily that he flew across the deck, the blow to his hand seizing his senses for precious seconds. As he righted himself on protesting knees, he felt an inexplicable weightlessness. Clutching the afflicted hand to his chest and wiping soaked hair from his eyes with the other, Corvo looked up and saw in a leviathan of a wave the faces of forty two damned men and women on their toy of a ship. He tentatively slid his left hand from its glove and looked fully at the mark at last, wincing as the roiling air bit and lashed. He held it close and meant to whisper one thing, then another, and a third. Finally, with the wave within meters, he silently brought the searing brand to his cool lips.

The wave split. The sea curled delicately around the battered vessel and cradled it in its arms. The mark hummed softly.


	4. Halved

It didn't strike him as anything but a mild inconvenience. It may have never drawn from him more than a passing acknowledgment were it not for Emily. Utterly spent from the demands of the weakening empire, they often retired to a secluded riverbank to wander and play, a favorite escape of Emily's in her first tumultuous year on the throne. Corvo knew better than to bring his new curiosity to anyone's attention, much less Emily's, but when the young empress demanded to know whether his refection in a still pond rivaled the absurd distortions of her own, he hadn't the will to decline; he learned quickly that there was no hiding the mark and its many temperaments from her sharp eye, drained and exhausted and eternally needed by the restless court though she was. He bent warily over the glittering pool. His eyes widened as hers crinkled in childish laughter. "Look at your nose in there!" she said, "If the tallboys were still hobbling around I'd give it its own stilts!" She stood and continued along the bank, wind whipping at her jacket. Corvo stared at the pond. Not at his reflection, of course, for there was none that his eyes could see.

For weeks, he had avoided anything even resembling a reflective surface in the company of others, excusing himself often and explaining little, assuming his mirrored self was universally absent. After his walk with Emily, however, he fabricated dozens of opportunities to determine whether all others could see what he could not. He shattered a charm at each confirmation, and when they were no more, a rune.

He remained silent on the matter. Some suspected, none guessed. In time, it became easier to bear. During one of his many wanderings in the void, often uninterrupted and uninitiated by his dark eyed benefactor, he at last thought to reach out and cup a handful of water trickling upward from one corner of the abyss to another, holding the pool over his head to halt its ascent. He sighed haltingly at his reflection. It smiled back.


	5. Forever

So often did Corvo wander the void in his advanced age that he wondered. Would his mortal body crumble and his soul slip seamlessly into this abyss to wander forever? Forever. He had never bothered with the flighty notion. Lord Protectors knew only the present, or else their charge knew no future. Yet when he woke to simply wake into the void again, and again, until he at last met the physical world with strangled sobs and glistening with sweat after a hundred false starts, "forever" bothered with him.


End file.
